The Trump Presidency

Uh he originally ran independently... So...
I just love all you missinformed.

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Trump ran as a Republican, won as a Republican, acted entirely as Republicans do, and currently enjoys the backing of the entire Republican voting base - much like W&Cheney, before it all turned to shit.

Everyone in his cabinet, everyone on his chosen staff during the campaign and in the White House, everyone who works for him at a senior level, his entire immediate family, and most of his appointed major agency heads.

But I guess since you have never had the police called to your residence by the FBI because your girlfriend googled something like I have; your unaware of almost anything relevant to what "SWAMP" refers to...

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The FBI is run by Republicans, has been for years - some of them are now Trump appointments. His administration has been working hard to expand government surveillance operations against citizens.

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Clinton server may have been hacked by Chinese leading to the torture and murder of several CIA operatives.

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Wrong thread.
Exposure of foreign intelligence operations and operatives has been a hallmark of recent Republican administrations, of course, including Trump's. So we could discuss that here, if you like.

Wrong thread.
Exposure of foreign intelligence operations and operatives has been a hallmark of recent Republican administrations, of course, including Trump's. So we could discuss that here, if you like.

When the intelligence operations focused on Iranian nuclear weapons development - including the identities of cooperating sources in the scientific establishment of Iran, CIA agents still in the field, stuff like that - were partially blown by Republican disinformation campaigns trying to protect the Republican falsehoods about the Iraq War, the Republican voter and Republican Party leadership was perfectly fine with that. That's how Republicans roll, these days. They're depraved.

Famous for it.

The Trump administration has been, will be, no different. There's no way top officials with the highest security clearances can buddy up with Putin's Familia like this without betraying a few American agents and sources along the way.

Cynicism:
so....
Trump decreases tax rates to help pay for the tariff increases on imports.
and
consumer activity is up and blowing the stock markets and GDP as they buy up before the tariffs kick in..

so...
When the tariffs take full effect and Trumps trade war with every on is full on, the stock market and GDP should collapse big time... yes? (ETA mid December-2018- Feb. 2019)

The only saving grace I can see is the huge military spend that the world is spending on USA hardware (Japan, S.Korea, Australia, NATO, Saudi etc) due to the war mongering Trump has been doing...

I doubt many Americans are buying stuff in advance to hoard against tariffs kicking in.

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maybe not retail consumers as such but certainly trade and wholesale, manufacturers etc. would be hedging the market with their tax cuts more than likely. Generally I am suggesting that the current market/GDP growth figures are only a tariff, tax reduction, trade war bubble ....one that Trump may or may not be deliberately orchestrating...
we shall soon see either way... I guess...

It turns out that, since the beginning of 2018, all scientific research is being funneled through a political review process. Specifically, the Department of the Interior is reviewing all scientific funding requests above $50,000 to ensure that grants “better align with the administration’s priorities.”
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The person who has been assigned to lead this political review of research proposals is Steve Howke, - -
- - - What sort of qualifications does Howke have to be reviewing scientific research proposals? - - -
Howke is — and I am not making this up — an old football buddy of Zinke’s. He went to school with Zinke from kindergarten through Whitefish High School in Montana, where they played on the team together. He considers Zinke a “close friend” and supported his campaign for House.

And as for his qualifications, “Howke’s highest degree is a bachelor’s in business administration,” Pickett reports. “Until Zinke appointed him ... Howke had spent his entire career working in credit unions.”

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W&Cheney did something like that - this is now fairly normal for Republican governance (Scott Brown, Harriet Meiers, and the Regnery crowd under W; Betsy Devos et al). But the open and almost innocent quality of it, the genuinely guilt-free brazenness with which it is done, may be truly new in American politics.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.

In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.

But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nations have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.
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Given Trumps penchant for fabricating stuff to keep him self in the headlines, perhaps he himself wrote the above?

It's more of the same - Republicans in general are trying to get clear of this latest monster they set loose without losing the opportunity to loot the wreckage, to obscure their role and responsibility in the latest Republican Party disaster without giving up the payoffs.

And the NYT is giving them the most valuable op-ed rug there is to cover ass with.

An anonymous source has reported that the high council of Galafre has voted Peter Rabbit to be the new emperor of the known universe.
OK
Quick question:
Why is it that we do not have an elector on the high council of Galafre?

Curious that the NYT in it's anti-Trump zeal has most likely inadvertently embraced the Koch brothers.

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Not at all - the NYT has been sucking up to the wingnut money piles among their readers for many years. They hired Bill Kristol to write columns for them, remember? They spent the entire final week of the 2016 campaign obsessing about Clinton's emails, right on cue - more coverage than they had given to Clinton's policy proposals in the previous two months.

not being san idiot does not seem to be a requirement in the publishing world

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It's called "bipartisan" and "objective" and "both sides" when its profit-feeding role needs to be covered up -
and pointing out that making a profit like that is idiocy for a newspaper like the NYT (whose primary product is the integrity and thoroughness of its news coverage) is a routine observation of the "extreme" left. So welcome aboard.

One of the reasons you have this doubt is because it reflects your own regard for the world.

There is, of course, further irony insofar as the attitudes you promote in the world are the ones that would upend such eminently reasonable expectations that botching this part wouldn't hurt a business.

Function really is an important aspect. In theory, the Times wouldn't run a bogus anon op-ed on the grounds that it would destroy them. To the other, they are clearly being used; the op-ed was mostly an attempt to establish a context of separation 'twixt conservatives and the president they struggle so hard to elect, protect, and betray.

The likely candidate for authorship, by the way, is a Cohn-connected appointee who worked, at some point, with her alleged alternate, a loyal Pence staffer; her appointment replaces in the Trump White House a veteran hand brought on from Pence's operation. It stands out, to me, that precisely nobody is looking at this one person; before she was Trump's, her former boss was precisely the sort of person, and precisely the person, who claims to have actively subverted the U.S. government by stealing from the President of the United States. She has two connections, from the period, to pick up Pence's pet word, and is an advocate of American capitalism in a discourse presuming that "business" should be running the world, and thus could easily strike such an hubristic tone as to assure the people that unelected hands are running the government. A publicly-declared junta ought to force Congressional Republicans to act, not try to give them excuse. Remember deregulation and whatever passes in the GOP for tax reform are the bright spots of Trump's presidency, according to our anonymous source.

It's kind of crazy: He's not Putin's puppet, the author ends up explaining; the incompetent Donald Trump is their puppet.